Nico, 1988

I rated this 8/10. Maybe I should have rated it higher. There are parts of this film that I am not sure if they are flawed or genius. A bit like Nico's ouevre, so that is perhaps appropriate. I was utterly transfixed for the duration of the movie. And yet by what I do not know. Relatively little happens. There are long silences. Yet both what is said and not said manages to restlessly slip away from cliche, and at the end I felt like I understood something I did not understand before. I am not sure who I could recommend this film to, yet I feel like I experienced something masterful

A strong biographical drama portraying the last years of singer Nico, former Velvet Underground. It develops well her uneasy character, her personal relations, her artistic view. The movie is good in all technical traits. However, what is impossible not to highlight is the outstanting performance by Tirine Dyrholm. He is simply amazing in the leading role, showing all the anger, sadness, impatience, impulsiveness, sometimes vatious of these feelings at once! As I read in two otber review, if the world were better (or if Acadeny Awards were serious), she would have certainly won the Oscar as the best actress.

Everyone involved in the creation of 'Nico, 1988' deserves a huge amount of praise and respect for creating a film so unflinchingly honest, so authentic. Nico, eternally dressed up in others' wardrobes, in others' colours and artistic mirages, has finally been depicted on screen for who she really was, and because Christa Paffgen was infinitely more fascinating than 'Nico' ('Don't call me Nico, call me by my real name', she says early in the film to her new Mancunian manager, revealing the agenda of the filmmaking), 'Nico, 1988' is truly captivating.

'Nico, 1988' isn't a film for Velvet Underground fans (although I am most definitely one of those, especially the first two albums), and it isn't a film for anyone who believes Nico was a charming soft rock folk star after her VU years (songs written by others, yet more attempts by men to 'create' their warmer, sexier version of the Germanic, marketable beauty of Nico); not unlike her own music, this a film that is almost for no one, namely her passionate yet miniscule fan base ('No One Is There'). As Paffen says in the film, 'I'm selective about my audience'. That some people appear not to be able to understand this film or come to it with the wrong expectations seems in a strange way perfectly fitting. Nico is still ahead of her time, thirty years after her death.

Nico was one of the most interesting human beings of the twentieth century, which was probably the most fascinating, most cruel, most bizarre and most eventful century in human existence, and she seemed to experience most of what those years had to offer. Despite that, despite the myriad of famous people she dated, had children with and took heroin and LSD with (those looking for 'that' Nico are looking for the wrong Nico), depicting her on screen was never going to be easy, and as a massive fan of Nico's art I was going to be one of the hardest viewers to win over (I even bought a harmonium directly because I adored her music and songwriting, so casual fan I am not).

Not only did the film's authenticity suspend my disbelief, I was entirely convinced that Trine Dyrholm actually was Nico. In a better world, surely her performance would win an Oscar, but alas, too few people even know Nico's reality, know her mannerisms, know her booming funereal, avant-garde music that sounded hundreds of years old yet at the same time cutting-edge and far more intellectually advanced than her peers' guitar-based conventionality to truly appreciate how brilliant her homage to Paffgen is. She shows us the real Nico, the blunt, honest, temperamental, paranoid, bitter, at times disarmingly sweet, funny, suffering Nico, the Nico who was unable to be a good mother despite how much she loved her son. Nico, the completely unpretentious heroin abuser who was used up and spat out from the most pretentious of worlds: modelling, art and music, worlds people endlessly wanted to talk to her about with wide, hungry eyes. Nico seemed to live the life of a hundred people, to have experienced everything, yet she appeared to be the most lonely, broken and misunderstood of people, fuelled by a furious black flame of talent and a brutal honesty that most people could never come close to relating to.

Naturally, Nico was extremely wary of people, especially her own fans or anyone who revered her, and her on stage performances could be more like sneering attacks on the Lou Reed-wannabe poseurs in attendance. 'Nico, 1988's most thrilling and important scene is when an initially sceptical and heroin-craving Nico performs 'My Heart Is Empty' in Communist Czechoslovakia at an underground illegal gig for a small hardcore crowd. The fevered Nico seems to tap into the forbiddenness of the event, the authenticity, the risk, these are her people for once, this is real, she seems to be enjoying herself for the first time in the film. But like everything in Nico's existence it is a fleeting happiness, as the police raid the event and the band is forced to get into a packed car and flee the country before they end up in prison.

Nico's music was the sound of defeat, it was the sound she heard as a child that never left her, that continued to ring in her ears and haunt her for her entire life, the sound of bombs dropping on Berlin at the end of World War 2. As one world ended another was created, a new Europe, an apparent new hope for the western world, with liberation for women, for minorities, an exciting new playground of sexuality and hedonism to explore. Nico lived long enough to experience the emptiness of humanity both as the sound of bombs fell and as the sound of raucous New York Warhol parties went on into the night, and as the sad song says, 'Is That All There Is?' To Nico, both the sound of the bottom and the sound of the top were ghostly, transitory illusions, neither as real nor as powerful as her booming harmonium and harsh Germanic accent that still unnerves and inspires in 2018.

Hopefully this film encourages more people to listen to the real Nico and give her music a chance, for the difficult, scary and suffocatingly intense beauty of Nico's individuality deserves never to be forgotten, especially in a world that becomes more plastic, disposable and artistically barren by the year.

Andy Warhol said that everyone has their fifteen minutes of fame. And he gave Nico, a beautiful young model, her fifteen minutes by pairing her with the Velvet Underground, a rock band in his orbit who were starting their careers. If I recall correctly, the Velvets were unconvinced by their guest singer, but the one album they made together became a cult success. But what do you do when your moment of fame passes? Nico died in relative obscurity before the age of 50, grappling with heroin addiction. As a concept, 'Nico, 1988' might be imagined to be simply unbearably sad. But in fact, there's a lot to enjoy in Susanna Nicchiarelli's film. Her Nico is an addict, sure, with all that that entails, but also a not unaccomplished jazz-rock singer, and a real person trying to extract meaning from her life. It's not easy for her, but neither is this a story of a life not worth living; and her death a sudden and mostly unexpected tragedy the same as anyone else's. Trine Dyrholm is very good in the lead role bringing the character to three-dimensional life. It's an unsentimental movie, but in no senses a cold one.

"Nico, 1988" (2017 Italian-Belgian co-production; 93 min.) is a bio-pick that examines the last 2 years of Nico, the German singer/performer who because instantly famous in the mid/late 60s for her association with Andy Warhol and of course her collaboration with The Velvet Underground. As the movie opens, we are told it is "1986" and we get to know Nico, who is moving into a small and unremarkable house in gray and gloomy Manchester, England. She is about to tour with her new band, made up mostly of second or third rate musicians, but her manager can't afford better. Along the way we see Nico struggling with her heroin addiction. At this point we are 10 min. into the movie, but to tell you more of the plot would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Couple of comments: this movie is directed by directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli, whom I admit I am not familiar with. In fact, much of this Italian-Belgian co-production features a cast of unknowns, except for Danish actress Trine Dyrholm in the title role (we saw her most recently in the excellent "The Commune"). Dryholme is absolutely sensational as the latter day Nico, and she carries the movie on her shoulders (she is in virtually every frame of the movie). On top of that, Dryholm also does her own singing of the various songs from Nico's solo albums that we hear and watch throughout the movie). Is everything that we watch in this film truly an accurate reflection of how those last two years of Nico's life? I haven't a clue, but one does get the sense that there is a good overall narrative in this film, for whatever that's worth.

I likely would've missed this film but for the fact that during a recent family visit to Belgium, I heard about this and then read an interview with Trine Dyrholm in a Belgian magazine. The movie opened the very weekend I was there. The Friday early evening screening where I saw this at in Antwerp, Belgium, was attended okay but not great. That's hardly a surprise as this isn't the type of movie that will find a large mainstream audience. But if you are interested in learning more about Nico's latter years in life, you could do a lot worse than watching this movie, and hence I'd readily recommended you do (I have my doubts this will get a theatrical release in the US so check it out on VOD or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray).